With the most important and intriguing presidential election that I can remember coming up in the US, Will America Change? is a timely reflection on whether the world’s only hyperpower has the ability or the will to modify behaviours and attitudes which have a profound effect on all the countries of the world, from Argentina to Zambia. Parts of this book were previously published as Why Do People Hate America?, and this is very much a polemical work – but it is well structured and well argued, and certainly a thought-provoking synthesis of the reasons why these question needs to be asked.

The book takes as its starting point the premise that 9/11 was not in any way a watershed for America’s relations with the world – indeed, that America’s troubled relationship with Islam can be traced back to the voyages of Columbus, who set out to look for a new route to the East in the context of the struggle between Christianity and Islam in the Mediterranean. Considerable time is spent on contextualising current American foreign policy with a century and half of intervention in the internal affairs of other nations, invasions and occupations, proving that Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing new (see also A People’s History of American Empire). Through deconstruction of the post-9/11 West Wing episode Isaac and Ishmael, we see how even liberal, educated Americans perceive the world, through the characters’ own answers to the question of why people hate America. Many of their answers are predictably simplistic or just plain wrong.

The authors then produce an excellent chapter on movies and American myth – highlighting the way that the global industry of Hollywood has shaped and reflected the American sense of identity, from the Western adventures of John Wayne and others to action movies and historical epics – and there’s an excellent chapter on the role of television, a more immediate and daily means for Americans to acquire information. In one particularly revealing passage on the subject of torture, we discover that Jack Bauer’s constant use of torture in 24 (67 times in five ‘worst days of his life’) has real world effects – abusive interrogations at Guantanamo started three weeks after the second season of 24. I confess I won’t look at the programme in the same light again.

In an excellent but depressing chapter on ‘National Myths and Myth-Making in America’, the country’s idea of itself is contrasted with the reality. Given the insularity of the average American, and the low level of information about the outside world that they receive through their media, the idea of America the friend of democracy, supporter of oppressed peoples, champion of freedom is still alive and well. The authors give us a whistle-stop tour of America’s disregard for international law and its willingness, under both Republican and Democrat presidents, to put its own national interest front and centre – from refusing to ratify the UN convention on the rights of the child (as it would make it illegal for them to execute people under 18), to preaching free-market economics while actually protecting their own markets from the imports of the third-world countries on which they are dumping vast quantities of cut-price goods. This chapter made me seethe with anger at the hypocrisy of it all.

The only conclusion I could draw from this book, sadly, is that whoever wins the forthcoming election, it will take more than a change of leadership in America to bring about real change. However much hope I, and many like myself, might place in Barack Obama (and I do still want him to win), the fact is that it will take more than an intelligent, relatively liberal President  to bring about a sea-change in the way America conducts its relations with the world, and to reverse decades of damage on the cultures and economies of other less-developed nations. While this book did not address all of what intrigues me about the US (for instance, gun control, race relations, and Church vs State issues like abortion and evolution), it’s an excellent overview of how America sees itself in the world, and how that myth came to be. A sobering and necessary read.

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